Back in 1997, in a bid to assure the electorate of its economic credibility, Labour famously pledged to stick to the Tories' public spending limits for the first two years of the new parliament. The move meant public services were initially drained of resources (the plans were described by then-chancellor Ken Clarke as "eye-wateringly tight") but history has recorded it as a political success.

As he seeks to burnish his own economic credentials, some in Labour have been urging Ed Miliband to repeat this trick and sign up to the coalition's post-2015 spending plans (a subject I explored in the NS back in January). Such a move, so the theory goes, would repel the Tories' "deficit denier" attacks and convince voters that the party can be trusted with the nation's purse strings again.

To date, it is an option that Miliband and Ed Balls have notably refused to rule out. As chief economic adviser to Gordon Brown, Balls helped mastermind the original 1997 pledge and has already declared that his "starting point" is that Labour will "have to keep all these cuts", a step towards accepting Osborne’s baseline. When Harriet Harman told the Spectator in September that Labour would not match the Tories’ spending plans and abandon its "fundamental economic critique" of the coalition, she was forced to issue a retraction.

But today's Independent reports that there is now a "growing consensus" in the shadow cabinet in favour of rejecting Osborne's spending limits and outlining an alternative strategy. Instead of promising to match the Tories' planned pace of deficit reduction, the paper says the party will pledge to invest in priority areas such as housing. It's important to point out that this doesn't mean Labour won't impose cuts elsewhere, rather it means splitting the burden more equally between cuts and tax rises and reducing borrowing (which, owing to the failure of Osborne's plan, is forecast to be £108bn in 2014-15) at a rate the economy can bear.

Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives have leapt gleefully on the story, with the Tory Treasury Twitter account declaring, "we now know that Labour will go into the election with a plan to borrow and spend more, putting up the deficit". George Osborne, who remains the Conservatives' chief electoral strategist, has long hoped to run his own version of the party's successful 1992 campaign, which accused Labour of planning a "tax bombshell" after Neil Kinnock and John Smith chose not to match John Major's spending plans. But could the Tories' joy could be premature? A Labour source described the Independent story to me as "total rubbish", adding:

They've taken some Fabian Society report out next week which says Labour should not match Tory spending plans post 2015 and spun it as the view of the leadership. As we've always said, we will not make our tax and spending commitments till the time of the election. It would be irresponsible to do otherwise, who knows where the economy and public finances will be in two months' time, let alone two years.

As in 1997, Labour is likely to wait until just a few months before the general election before announcing its decision. Balls and Miliband have learned from the mistakes of the Tories, who promised to match Labour's spending plans in 2007 only to abandon this pledge after the crash in 2008.

But the question remains: has Labour genuinely not made up its mind or has it merely chosen not to tell us yet? My guess is the former but it's likely that Miliband, a leader who thrives on defying conventional wisdom, is minded to reject Osborne's spending limits. A pledge to do otherwise (a trick straight out of the New Labour playbook) would run entirely counter to the post-Blairite spirit of his leadership. Embracing Tory levels of austerity would also deny the economy the stimulus it will badly need and split the left. The challenge facing Labour is finding a means of rejecting Osborne's plans while simultaneously convicing the electorate that it can be trusted not to "crash the car" again.

Update: Ed Balls was on LBC radio this morning (a slot dubbed "Balls Calls") and described the Independent report as "simply wrong". He said:

It is an exclusive but it is wrong I’m afraid Nick and you know, it is a report of a Fabian Society commission which comes out next week. The Fabian Society is a research society, it has been there for 100 years, affiliated with the Labour Party, they are coming up with some conclusions about spending. It is not Labour Party policy. It is not something that I’ve even discussed…

Balls added that it would be "totally irresponsible" for him "to come along on here or the Independent and tell you our tax and spending plans two years before the election".

Again, however, it is notable that Balls has not ruled out promising to outspend the Tories. He has merely restated that Labour will not publicly announce its decision until closer to the election. As I wrote above, it is plausible that in private Labour takes the view that it should reject Osborne's spending limits.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.